No German provision for Soviet wounded?

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Sid Guttridge
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No German provision for Soviet wounded?

#1

Post by Sid Guttridge » 21 Jan 2023, 06:47

In 1941-42 the Catholic priest Pirro Scavizzi was a chaplain on Italian hospital trains to the Eastern Front on six occasions. On four occasions he wrote reports for the Vatican detailing what he found. Among other things, he accurately reported the early stages of the mass murder of Jews in Ukraine and cannibalism among Russian POWs who were not being fed by the Germans.

Scavizzi, who was engaged in medical work, also reported that the Germans were making no medical provision for Soviet wounded. Given the deaths of 2-3 million Soviet POWs due to starvation over the winter of 1941-42, this seems plausible, but is it true?

What medical provision did the Germans make for Soviet wounded? Were there instructions on the matter? Did it alter over the course of the war?

Cheers,

Sid.

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Westphalia1812
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Re: No German provision for Soviet wounded?

#2

Post by Westphalia1812 » 22 Jan 2023, 12:11

Sid Guttridge wrote:
21 Jan 2023, 06:47
In 1941-42 the Catholic priest Pirro Scavizzi was a chaplain on Italian hospital trains to the Eastern Front on six occasions. On four occasions he wrote reports for the Vatican detailing what he found. Among other things, he accurately reported the early stages of the mass murder of Jews in Ukraine and cannibalism among Russian POWs who were not being fed by the Germans.

Scavizzi, who was engaged in medical work, also reported that the Germans were making no medical provision for Soviet wounded. Given the deaths of 2-3 million Soviet POWs due to starvation over the winter of 1941-42, this seems plausible, but is it true?

What medical provision did the Germans make for Soviet wounded? Were there instructions on the matter? Did it alter over the course of the war?

Cheers,

Sid.
The German treatment of Soviet POWs was often enough dependant on different orders given by different COs. Just one example:
The picture is no less contradictory when it comes to the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. True, in July the Korück stressed that it was indispensable to "treat Red soldiers who surrender as prisoners of war."
But this order did not lack the perfidious addition: "If shootings become necessary, they are therefore in principle to be carried out in such a way that civilians will not notice."

However, only a minority of the captured Red Army prisoners were threatened by this - the commissars, and a little later also the Jews. For the rest of the prisoners, however, other principles were to apply. At the beginning of August, the 2nd Army, which wanted to release some of the prisoners anyway, explicitly reminded Korück 580 of its "full responsibility" for their "guarding, housing and feeding"; "against cases of rough treatment" the commander-in-chief, Colonel General Maximilian Freiherr von Weichs, even threatened to court-martial them. This shows that there was "crudeness" at that time, during the deportation and also in the quickly improvised camps. But it also shows that at that time there was no question of plans for the systematic murder or even pauperization of the Soviet prisoners of war. The problem was rather that in the chaos of the war of movement the camps differed greatly, if only because the room for maneuver of the individual commanders was relatively large. In addition to camps such as the notorious one in Minsk, where conditions escalated in a very short time, there were camps such as the Dulag, whose commandant was under the impression that the prisoners would quickly realize "that we mean well with them and see to it that they get enough to eat and that we also take care of the medical care of the wounded in the best possible way." This was no mere conceit. Even at the camp in Minsk, the AOK 2 demanded "immediate drastic measures" to put an end to the atrocious conditions. At least this army wanted to prevent "misconduct" in the treatment of prisoners of war from making "the propaganda carried into the enemy to defect" ineffective.

If one takes everything together, at least this territory of the Wehrmacht is an example of the fact that its occupation policy only gradually and above all partially radicalized. Not only the sentences, which the court-martial of this Korück still passed at that time, speak for the fact that the laws and customs of war had not yet been completely forgotten here. The signals coming from the superior 2nd Army were also contradictory: "As much as the troops in the eastern region must appear as masters, they must on the other hand avoid everything that is likely to shake the confidence of the population in the German Wehrmacht," read their directive of July 17, 1941. Certainly this contradictory sentence is an appeal to the German "Herrenmenschenmoral". But it is also true that for this army the interests of the civilian population were more than just a quantité négligeable.
Wehrmacht im Osterkrieg - Front und militärisches Hinterland 1941/42 Christian Hartmann, p. 280-282.

I removed the footnotes.
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Sid Guttridge
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Posts: 10158
Joined: 12 Jun 2008, 12:19

Re: No German provision for Soviet wounded?

#3

Post by Sid Guttridge » 22 Jan 2023, 16:59

Hi Westphalia1812,

For 2-3 million Soviet prisoners to die of malign neglect in about 6 months over the turn of 1941-1942 argues that somebody somewhere quite high up had decided on a differential policy that achieved this end result.

However, this began to have effect after the July-August dates identifiable in your quote.

Cheers,

Sid.

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